As an offering for Shakespeare 400, the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Sakari Oramo joined forces with actors from Shakespeare’s Globe to perform an abridgement of Antony and Cleopatra, directed by Iqbal Khan, with the incidental music Florent Schmitt composed for the 1920 premiere of André Gide’s translation of the play.
Schmitt is a difficult figure, his reputation tarnished by his antisemitism in the 1930s and his collaborationist stance during the second world war. But in the 1920s, he was much admired, and his score, from which two orchestral suites alone survive, is a heady effort, exotically orchestrated, reminiscent on occasion of Debussy, Ravel and Strauss.
The driving force behind the project was the Globe’s director of music Bill Barclay, who trimmed the play down for a cast of five playing multiple roles, and reordered the contents of the suites to form a coherent musico-dramatic whole. The big set-piece depicting the battle of Actium was performed unbroken, as was a ballet sequence that Schmitt dubbed Orgie et Danses, during which Khan, perhaps wisely, kept the actors off the platform.
Elsewhere, the score flowed fragmentarily beneath the text. There was a superb synchronicity between actors and orchestra, with every emotional shift carefully underscored. Simon Paisley Day’s Antony and Janie Dee’s Cleopatra loved and fought while Schmitt’s music at its most extravagant surged round them, and an impressionist haze accompanied Brendan O’Hea’s Enobarbus as he described Cleopatra’s journey down the river Cydnus. Fascinating, every second of it.
